I think the most important moral responsibility as a scientist is to pursue truth. Science doesn't mean it's truth. Just because we're doing science doesn't mean we know it all and we know the truth. It's the pursuit of truth.
Curiosity is a universal human trait, and it's a key ingredient in the scientific and technological discoveries that have advanced the human condition over centuries. But curiosity alone does not lead to discovery and innovation without the freedoms guaranteed in a nation like the United States of America. In unfree societies, curiosity is often stymied. It is often discouraged, and it is often met with violent repression. Ask too many questions or search for alternatives to the officially sanctioned way of doing things, and it's dangerous. In authoritarian societies, it can get you killed. But curiosity, when allowed to follow its course, can bring fabulous and novel inventions into our world, enriching lives and changing history in the process. Fei-Fei Li embodies the pursuit of truth that is driven by curiosity. Often referred to as the godmother of AI, Fei-Fei spoke with senior fellow Stephen Kotkin at her company's headquarters in San Francisco, where curiosity enabled by the unique conditions of freedom in the United States is pushing the boundaries of what is possible with artificial intelligence. Fei-Fei's story illustrates the best that our country has to offer. Here now to discuss her Only in America's story, Fei-Fei Li.
Okay, first of all, this is the whole company, so.
Yeah, this floor only. How many people you got?
Oh, I have 40 now. What was your specialty?
Authoritarian regimes. So Russia, China, communism, Stalin, Mao, but just authoritarianism generally and then war diplomacy, geopolitics, power institutions.
In the meanwhile, make sure you get a shot of those beauties.
Yeah, I am a fan of those shoes. Actually, the CEO of this brand emailed and said, "What's your shoe size? I think you need some shoes." And then she just sent this to me.
I love it. I can see you're married to an artist because you notice these things.
Yeah, it's been like that for a while now. I'm the interior decorator. I'm her fashion consultant.
Really? But she's got great style and taste obviously.
Roll cameras.
B mark.
Whenever you're ready.
I'm here with Fei-Fei Li, co-founder of World Labs here in San Francisco, a colleague of mine, a professor at Stanford University. So you and I overlapped at Princeton. I was on the faculty there, you were undergraduate.
Undergraduate, although you eventually joined the faculty and we overlapped on the faculty as well now. So Princeton University, undergraduate Caltech, a PhD, Princeton University again on the faculty, Stanford University faculty, lots of opportunity there. Talk about your understanding of opportunity and institutions and what opportunities came your way and when and how you understood them and how you took advantage of them and made them work for you.
Opportunity is a great word in America. As an immigrant, I came here with my parents when I was 15 year old and we landed in New Jersey, an hour away from Princeton, so Parsippany, New Jersey. As an immigrant, there was a really interesting paradox because I did not know the language. We did not know anybody. My parents, just like so many immigrants, we came with $20 in our pocket. So there seemed to be no opportunities.
So you're a high school aged-
A young girl landing in New Jersey, which maybe wasn't part of the geography of the schools that you had previously gone to.
And also I was too young. My parents made the decision. I didn't even know what I was doing.
Yeah. So at the beginning it seemed like there was no opportunity.
But if we fast track to 30 plus years later where I am, I am so grateful that this land is truly a land of opportunities. Looking at the journey my family and I have taken that I now get to appreciate that I had the freedom to pursue any opportunity I could work for. And that has become my understanding of opportunity is not anything that's handed to you, is a place that allows you to work so hard to dream big or small and to seize those opportunities.
So it's hard to imagine a 15-year-old not speaking English to then be receiving a few years later a bachelor's degree from Princeton University, a PhD from Caltech, but there must be some drive or parental support or some ambition and some vision that puts you in a position to see those opportunities. Not everybody understands, for example, that they should apply to Princeton University even if they live an hour away. It's something that people have to understand that that opportunity is there. So what happened for you to perceive those opportunities or drive you to those opportunities?
That's a great question. The reason I applied to Princeton, it has only one thing to do with one person in the universe, and that's Albert Einstein, is because since I was a teenager or pre-teen, I just loved physics. Physics was my first love. Till today, I still love physics even though I'm so far away from physics right now. But as a teenager, even though I was an immigrant, my parents and I had to work all kinds of jobs, cashier, cleaning girl, restaurant takeout girl and all that. I dreamed about physics. So when I was applying for college, I applied for the Morris County College. I remember that's where Parsippany is, Morris County. I applied for New Jersey State University, Rutgers, but I just had to apply to Princeton because that's where Albert Einstein was. You asked about what was the push.
That's a really interesting question because my parents are, in hindsight, are relatively unique, in my opinion, is that they didn't push me. Genuinely, they were not the ones who were checking my homework, asking which college I was thinking of checking, partially just because they didn't have the knowledge to even know how to push me.
First generation immigrants.
First generation. They were trying to survive, and it was very, very difficult. I wrote that in my book, "The Worlds I See". My mom had very bad health till today. So they didn't push me because they didn't know how to push me. But in hindsight, they gave me the unconditional love to pursue my dream. They never said, "Because we were poor, you have to be a doctor or you have to be an accountant or you have to be something." When I was totally in love with special relativity and Albert Einstein, not for a single moment they said, "This is probably not the easiest path to make money." They just never did that. And my dad came with an innate sense of curiosity. He would find curiosity in a, we didn't have money to go to paid entertainment, but he would take me to parks that are free. He would take me to yard sales that he finds it fun to, almost like a scavenger hunt. And so he finds curiosity in so many places in life. That was a gift that I didn't know it was a gift till I grew up and realized that was a gift.
Yes. I have to say our stories are somewhat parallel in the sense that my family is also an immigrant family, but I'm fourth generation. I was the first generation to go to college. I was rejected from Princeton University, undergraduate and PhD twice in fact. But when I got there as faculty, the first thing I did was to try to find Einstein's office.
Yeah. In the Advanced Institute.
Yes. And so I found the building it was in, but there was no plaque for his office. But there were German words. There was a German saying above the fireplace in the common room.
Yeah, I know that fireplace very well.
My first week, because I went in knowing I want to do physics, we were in this, I think that building is rebranded. It was called Palmer Hall. We were in this lecture room.
My physics professor said, "Einstein used to sit in these seats," and I was there, right? I just felt like I died. I went to heaven.
Yes. So you get into these institutions in the United States, and again, you have to find your way. But the trajectory you make of entering Princeton University in the physics department, and by the time you blink your eye, here you are with a PhD from Caltech. You're carving this career out for yourself. How are you understanding the path that you're on? Are you on a path? You're a woman in physics and in computer science that maybe wasn't the dominant gender back then, at least from my-
Right? So there's a whole bunch of issues that one could imagine of how you navigated these spaces to seize those opportunities and to become the person you became.
Well, there are different aspect to answer this question. First is the career path, and of course, intertwined is the journey of becoming who you are for every person. Let me just start with the career path. I think I went into Princeton undergrad physics for the love of actual science of physics, but I realized along the way what I truly love about physics, it's not even necessarily the quantum mechanics, special relativity and Maxwell equations, not even necessarily those. It's the audacity to ask the hardest questions possible, the craziest, hardest questions.
That was what physics taught me, is that there are people hundreds of years before us who wanted to understand the path of all stars. There are people a hundred years before us who wanted to see the smallest particles of the universe. And there is Albert Einstein questioning what is time. These are the most audacious questions. So I was very inspired by that. So around my third, you were talking about junior paper, senior thesis.
Around that time, Princeton partially forced you to think about what's your choice of your junior papers and senior thesis. I start to ask what's my audacious question? And I was so inspired by these giants of 20th century physics, the Schrodinger, the Einsteins, the Roger Penrose of the world, that towards the second half of their career, they start to ask questions beyond atomic world. Einstein is always a humanist. Schrodinger wrote the book, "What is Life?" Roger Penrose wrote the book, "Emperor's New Mind". So I was so inspired. I realized my audacious question is intelligence. I wanted to understand if we can build machines that can be intelligent. I did not know at that time it was Alan Turing's question. I wasn't the first person in the world to ask that question, but I came from physics. I wasn't reading Alan Turing yet. So obviously Alan Turing in the 1940s actually asked that question, what is a thinking machine? Right?
So I decided that I'm going to go pursue the most audacious question of my career, which is AI or intelligence. That's when I went to Caltech. But at Caltech, I actually did almost a dual track. I did both computational neuroscience as well as artificial intelligence. And like you said, it's a blink. I never left that dream. It's just I feel so lucky and blessed that I found that-
But the audacity though, Fei-Fei Li, that's really the critical dimension here. A lot of us are sometimes looking what others are doing, how can we fit in, conformity. I used to joke at Princeton that there were two things I don't teach. One is creativity because you can't teach creativity. It's a sort of genetic or it's innate. And the other was conformity because they already know that. And then there'd be silence in the room.
They're like, "What's left?"
After I would say, "I don't teach conformity," there'd be silence in the room and then I would say, "See, there's no need to teach it." But here we're talking not conformity, we're talking audacity. We're talking about reaching for things, stretching for things, maybe finding a pathway that isn't the well-lit pathway or isn't the path dependence that we've come out of. So you write your senior thesis, you go to Caltech, you have neuroscience, you have artificial intelligence. By the way, that's actually a combination that we see quite a lot in your generation and the generation after. And so that audacity, that daring to go for it, to reach, to find something that's not the obvious pathway, that's a pretty special, the curiosity that you talked about that came from your father, that's still a pretty special trait.
